So, what's the reason for all this? Well, there are billions of people on Earth without Internet. Billions! What's a crazy (loon-y) idea to get them Internet? Step in Project Loon from Google X and Rich DeVaul. What's the net result of it all? You can see the little white dot-balloon in the photo bellow on the left floating over New Zealand.

Stunning photos of Google's latest moonshot project (or, to be specific, the scenery around the balloons).

Why Feminist Taylor Swift? Why not Feminist Kim Kardashian? Feminist Adele? Feminist Ashley Olsen? "I think it's because a lot of Taylor Swift lyrics can easily be interpreted in an antifeminist way. A few years ago I started listening to Swift a lot--it was the same summer I interned at NARAL, an organization that advocates a woman's right to choose. I've had to deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance being a Taylor Swift fan and a feminist at the same time. Like, "Oh, you're a feminist but you love listening to this girl talk about how much better life would be if a guy loved her?" and the answer is "Yes.""

The Feminist Taylor Swift Twitter account now has more than 82,000 followers with its sharp rewritings of Swift lyrics. "Get me with those green eyes baby as the lights go down / Because as a woman I am always subject to the male gaze..." File alongside KimKierkegaardashian.

It is not ending: Japan's top smartphone game Puzzle & Dragons has topped 15 million users across iOS, Android and Kindle devices on June 8, maker GungHo (3765) said today. What's interesting is that the company is still able to rack up 1 million users in three weeks or less - for the 13th time in a row (the 14 million user mark was passed on May 18). These are all Japanese users: Puzzle & Dragons is still only available over here, in the US, and in South Korea.

The game isn't just popular: it's hugely lucrative, having made $113m for GungHo in April 2013 alone, helping the developer overtake Nintendo for market cap. And now GungHo is palling up with Supercell, its nearest Western equivalent in terms of mobile gaming success, for cross-promotions and gameplay features in that company's Clash of Clans.

There is a five year period of popular music culture that represents an incredibly rich seam of fantastic independent music, much of which never had the opportunity to find its audience. It's an incredible gulf. A deep trench between the old music business and the new music business. A Grand Canyon of digital music.

Bands that suffered from piracy but didn't have access to tools like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Bandcamp and so on. The lost long tail of music between 1999-2004. Except thanks to iTunes, Spotify and other digital services, it's out there waiting to be rediscovered.

Punished by third-party quality reports because of the difficulty of using its touch-screen multimedia system, called MyFord Touch, the auto maker will reprise tuning and volume knobs for the radio as it redesigns existing models, a top Ford executive said. It is a reversal for Ford, which has been a first-mover with installing mobile-phone-based technologies, voice recognition and touch screens in its vehicles. The systems have been a big selling point for Ford with its vehicles, but also have dragged down its reputation for quality.

Insert own U-turn gag here. But it's a reminder that the touchscreens that work so well for smartphone and tablet apps have their drawbacks when deployed in cars. It's early days still, though. Ford and others are exploring voice controls too. Siri, play Born To Be Wild...

At the moment the value exchange we enter into when using online properties is straightforward: someone gives you a free online tool and in return they get to advertise to you. However this model is very fragile, especially if, consumers are able to simply and legally say no to advertising unless they explicitly allow it. Zannier's project points the way to the emergence of a whole new sector of personal data driven businesses aggregating consumer data: brokerage firms, given agency to license your digital 'biometric'; Insurance advisors, getting you the best possible car insurance, and even an oversight consortium policing these relationships.

Hot on the heels of its recent $2.2 million funding round, New York-based calendar startup Sunrise has added a couple of new features to its much-praised iOS app. The addition of Foursquare means that you can now use Sunrise as a diary as well as a calendar, letting it log the places you've been in the past. Tapping any entry will bring up that locations address and a map to help you find it again. As bonus that will please many users, Google Maps, rather than Apple Maps, are now used within the app. Meanwhile, there's now support for tech company database CrunchBase. This is something that won't be useful to everyone...

But will it be more or less useful to people than integrating Foursquare check-ins? These changes are sure to drum up an enthusiastic cheer from investors and fellow startups, but doesn't Sunrise want to make a difference to people's time management beyond that tech bubble?

On the recorded-music side, sources say Apple has agreed to carve out two buckets of revenue and whichever is higher will be where payments come from. In one bucket, Apple will store 10%-20% of ad revenue to cover its costs in lining up advertising and then split the remainder evenly with the labels. In the other bucket, Apple will pay slightly more than the pure-play rate that Pandora pays, which is $0.0012 per song stream. Some sources peg that number at $0.00125-$0.0013 per stream, but that bucket will also have a sliver of an undisclosed amount of ad revenue added to it.

In the US, paying out more than Pandora is a big deal within the music industry, especially as that company is trying to lower its royalty commitments. The great unknown: is iTunes Radio the missing ingredient that will make Apple's iAds a winner with more big brands?

Intel is testing a number of "experimental devices in the lab," one of which is a smartwatch-like device, according to chief technology officer Justin Rattner. "Actually, we're looking at novel display devices. The watch is kind of -- if you want to put the time on it, that's fine ," said Rattner at Bloomberg's Next Big Thing conference. "But if you're talking about texting today, wouldn't it be nice if you could just look at your wrist?"

And speak into it to reply, possibly? But the more interesting question here is whether Apple is involved in any of Intel's experiments.

"Big Data" is really popular with businesses these days, with the hope that it can provide great value, either to users, or to advertisers. Recording nearly everything that users do, which is what major search engines do, is bad for many reasons: The right thing to do is to keep just enough information to provide most of the benefit for the user, not all the information for a tiny additional benefit. The user really doesn't benefit from helping advertisers. I like seeing more relevant ads, but not at the cost of having my search engine remember every embarrassing query I've ever made. Just for fun, bad guys might break in and publish search histories. You can read about these kinds of incidents every week; it's never happened to Google, but it's still a bad idea to keep all that data. Just like public libraries, it is not the mission of a search engine to collect information for the government. OK, maybe in non-free countries that's the mission of both search engines and the public library, but that's not exactly the ideal that most of us hope for on the Internet.